Contractual Duties: Performance, Breach, Termination and Remedies provides guidance from four leading contract academics on the duties at play in a contract that is in dispute: its performance, breach, termination and the remedies available.

Main features:

Part 1 covers rescission: firstly its principles and process are explained.

Explains each of the possible grounds for rescission, including misrepresentation, mistake and non-disclosure; duress, undue pressure and influence; impaired capacity, unconscionable conduct and breaches of fiduciary duty.

Details the bars to rescission, explaining what damages might be due in lieu of rescission.

Outlines the consequences of rescission, including compensation, apportionment of loss and concurrent claims.

Part 2 introduces the different types of breach and the terminology that governs them, and explains strict and non-strict obligations.

It sets out and analyses concepts such as renunciation, anticipatory breach, and repudiation by actual breach.

Discusses the common law right to terminate for breach of condition, particularly with regard to time stipulations.

Explains innominate or intermediate terms, deriving from the Hongkong Fir case, and its reception in Australia and New Zealand.

Analyses the nature and process of termination for breach, including international principles, and explains the ‘entire obligation’ rule.

Part 3 deals with discharge by impossibility, illegality or frustration.

Part 4 discusses remedies available, beginning with the right to sue for a debt and the limits to such an action.

Covers damages for breach of contract, laying out the measures of award.

Explains financial loss, covering the various ways of expressing the loss, via concepts such as expectation, reliance, consequential damage, ‘cost of cure’ and balance sheet calculation, and questions of timing.

Analyses the two limbs of the Hadley v Baxendale principle and their consequences.

Covers other types of damages including agreed damage and gain-based awards.

Discusses specific relief, focusing on the grant of specific performance and injunctions.

Focuses on English contract law, but also shows how other jurisdictions have different approaches, and suggesting new ideas drawn from the US, Australia and civil law systems.

New to the 2nd edition:

Substantial case law updates across all four key areas of the book since the first edition was written in 2011

Includes analysis of the effect of recent legislation on contractual duties, i.e. the Consumer Rights Act 2014